Xscape

Epic;
2014

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Michael Jackson has released more new music in the five years since his death than in the 12 years before it. Jackson was a perfectionist about his music, and he recorded many more songs than he ever released. That means that there's a lot of unreleased material in his archives; Michael appeared in 2010, and now we've got this strange, underfed, vaguely horrid eight-song record, inexplicably named after the group that had a hit with "Just Kickin' It". It's a set of outtakes and misfires that Jackson recorded in the 20th century, freshly "re-produced" by L.A. Reid, Timbaland, and others to sound as if he'd just shown up to make a new record in a contemporary style.

That, it should be noted, is a trick that's been tried before with Jackson's music. When Motown overdubbed and remixed some of his decade-old factory seconds in 1984, it yielded the Farewell My Summer Love album, whose packaging briefly fooled a few people into thinking it was the follow-up to Thriller. It's true that the new versions sound more modern and souped-up than the originals (which you also get if you buy the "deluxe edition" of Xscape), but their producers don't have enough distance from Jackson's presence to reframe his voice the way that, say, Junkie XL's remix of "A Little Less Conversation" reframed Elvis Presley's.

It doesn't help that the outtakes they're dealing with are several tiers below the stuff that ended up on Jackson's later albums—maybe the estate is trying to parcel out the best material over time, maybe it doesn't get any better than this. "A Place with No Name" is Jackson's rewrite of America's two-chord wonder "A Horse with No Name", which is a bad enough idea on its own; Stargate, who produced the new version, replace the signature guitar riff with a sugary electroswing arrangement, but it doesn't help. Most of these tracks are Jackson hiccuping and eee-hee-ing on autopilot through underdeveloped semi-tunes; both Grace Jones and MC Lyte beat him to the title "Slave to the Rhythm" with much better songs. (The version here is not the one with Justin Bieber that leaked a while back.)

Jackson liked to present himself as pop's eternally youthful Peter Pan. In truth, he was more its Rabbit Angstrom, forever re-enacting his moment of moonwalking glory from a position of ever-increasing bitterness. Defensive, brittle songs like Xscape's title track ("don't you try to tell me what is right for me!") don't look good on anyone. The most embarrassing song here, though, is "Do You Know Where Your Children Are", a Dangerous outtake that apparently never got finished. (If Jackson knew what the bridge's lyrics were going to be, he wasn't letting on in the recording studio.) It's a finger-jabbing harangue about a 12-year-old runaway who's "tired of stepdaddy using her/ Saying that he'll buy her things while sexually abusing her" and ends up hooking on Sunset Boulevard. As courageously stand-taking as it was for Jackson to indicate that he opposed child abuse, it might not have been wise for his estate to release a song in which he's getting all sanctimonious about that particular topic. (The shred-by-numbers guitar solo that ends the new version doesn't do the song any favors either.)

The one keeper on Xscape is its opener, "Love Never Felt So Good", which is also its oldest song—it dates from 1983 or so—and the one that's been in circulation the longest: written by Jackson and Paul Anka, it initially surfaced on a 1984 Johnny Mathis album. It's got the best Jackson vocal here, too. The original take, which is mostly just his voice, fingersnaps and a piano, showcases the kind of gravity-defying singing-for-pleasure that we barely heard from him in the post-Thriller era. The deluxe version of Xscape appends a Timbaland-produced remix of "Love Never Felt So Good" on which Justin Timberlake sings along with the old tape, featuring disco flourishes borrowed from Jackson's "Working Day and Night". It sounds pleasantly like an echo of good Michael Jackson, but the fact that sampling an even earlier Jackson song makes it sound more contemporary says something about how wrongheaded this entire project is.